David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has set out in a Washington DC speech his credentials as a British foreign secretary capable of working with a Trump presidency, saying he “gets the agenda that drives America First”, and insisting he would seek to find “common cause” with Donald Trump.
He vowed a Labour government “will always work with the United States, whatever the weather and whoever wins” and in government he said he would work in the national interest.
Speaking at the Hudson Institute, a right-of-centre thinktank, Lammy also said Trump’s demands to see higher European defence spending had been effective and driven by geo-political reality, though he said he found the way Trump expressed that view “shocking”.
Lammy, known for his strong links with leading Democrats, is trying to redress a perceived imbalance by making a concentrated if risky push to woo US Republicans, including by meeting a group of Republican politicians in Washington.
He claimed Trump’s attitude to European security is often misunderstood. “I do not believe that he is arguing that the US should abandon Europe. He wants Europeans to do more to ensure a better defended Europe,” he said. “Were his words in office shocking? Yes, they were. Would we have used them? No. But US spending on European defence actually grew under President Trump, as did the defence spending of the wider alliance, during his tenure.”
Lammy pointed out that when Trump began his campaign, only four countries were spending 2% of GDP on defence. The number was 10 by the time he left office and it is 18 today, he said.
He urged European partners not to personalise the debate about defence spending, saying it is driven as much by the US’s need to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific region.
Asked about his own remarks in 2017 that Trump was a “racist Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathiser”, and that he vowed to “chain myself to the door of No 10” if the UK welcomed the US president on a state visit to the UK, Lammy said he had made those remarks as a backbencher.
He added: “You are going to struggle to find any politician in the western world who has not had things to say about Donald Trump.”
Asked about the protests on campuses over the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, he said: “There is a difference between peaceful protest of the kind Mandela would have advocated, and violence and rioting.” He added that he was concerned that the bandwidth of western democracies was growing slimmer. “I am outraged at what is happening to ordinary folk in Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Yemen, in Haiti. Why are we really not up in arms about these issues as well?
“I say gently to those who concentrate singly on a very ancient and terrible, terrible war that is taking place in Gaza: but let us not crowd out a lot of people suffering in our world today and underlining that the US and UK have to stand firm on so many fronts today.”
Stressing his personal background as someone who had been helped to Harvard Law School through Jewish sponsors, Lammy said the lowest point of his political life had been Labour’s failure to tackle antisemitism under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
He said struggling working-class communities in middle England and middle America were demanding their politicians attend to basic issues such as inflation and public services. He said: “That means domestic is everything. You win and lose on that basis. I get the agenda that drives America First.”
Lammy gently urged Trump to shift away from his heavy use of social media, saying: “I hope we are moving away from the tendency to talk about absolutely everything in the moment, and we are a little bit more conscious how opponents are really winding up the system in relation to that.
“There will be tensions, but in the end the nature of our shared intelligence capability and our military endeavour – and we saw that recently above the skies of Israel and Jordan – and our shared interest in pushing back against this authoritarian cabal that is coming together, means that I think we will survive the wrinkles when they appear.
He also called on the US and the UK to stand firm in alliance with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to confront Iran and Russia. He urged China to recognise that it was not in Beijing’s interest to forge an alliance with Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.